response to the chaos of our world was, significantly, to welcome both its order and its disorder to the greatest extent possible in the life of his art, the art of his life. (“Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”42) This project required an enormously accommodating humor, a humor that converged in him from multiple sources—from his early, Californian “sunny disposition” to Dada and Zen. It was Cage’s humor that made his extraordinarily generous invitation to possibility via chance operations possible in the first place. And it is in turn the idea of the possible which links the exigent, pragmatic-realist circumstances of his art to the utopian imagination. The central driving question for Cage was, in infinitely simple complexity, What is possible? What is possible given the complexity of the circumstances in which we live, given the material character of the medium in which we happen to be working, given the hellish interpenetrations of history, given the hope that material process and experience will come together in a manner useful to society?
In advance of a broken spirit is the sense that there can be no new thing or act or thought under the sun. The humors of possibility shift when we, with Cage, attend to, enter into, silence (all that our present disciplines of attention do not admit). Inviting silence, by chance, to have its say in his work just as it always has in the rest of the world, Cage threw open the doors of the concert hall, the museum, the library to previously estranged processes of the continually surprising, complex real. In this he curiously and delightfully conflated certain old-line Western dichotomies. He was apollonian and dionysian, purposeful and purposeless, serious and playful, calculatedly spontaneous. Cage was apollonian in needing to have a reasoned structure for every new composition, liking to work from starting points with grids and symmetry in order to give chance a level ground on which to play with the elements of the art. He was dionysian not only in the hearty sensual delight he took in material presence (sounds, words, paper, color … people, food, conversation, nature…) but in his enduring enthusiasm for the degree to which chance took things out of his control. What this really means is that his aesthetic framework was both intricate and commodious enough to allow an exploration of the range between/around/above/below/before/after the polarities that have defined the dialectical agon of both romanticism and modernism in Western art. In this sense Cage’s conversations with history, silence, chance, and us were grand postromodern polylogues.
The contrast between the Western tragic sense of life and the Eastern comic sense interested Cage. He thought that when you believe the gods are separate from everyday life, you see separation everywhere and experience it as loss. But if you think of the sacred and the profane as right next to one another, you can’t help but delight in the fullness of things. The immense, commodious humor in John Cage’s laughter was, along with the prodigious accomplishment of his work, the most astonishing thing about his mode of being in the world. It caught him, and those with him, like a fresh wind, a sudden aperture opening up in the matrix of the moment. His laughter, his humor, became more and more spiritual in its sources over the years, but with no decrease in gusto. Cage’s spirituality was not at all “transcendent” in the sense of removal from daily life but in fact a constant return to pragmatic concerns with a resonant sense of the interconnectedness of things—that we are all, persons and environment, “in it” together. The “it” that we are in is the chaos of this teeming, cacophonic, carnivalesque globe. And though we must all be respected as individual agents, our interconnectedness makes each of us responsible to the overall social and environmental framework we share. The positive (fresh) vision of beauty—the source of humor and pleasure—is anarchic harmony, a multiplicity of voices along the multidirectional staves of paradox. Not Paradise Lost (we never had it) but Paradox Lost (or do I mean found?)—the real tragedy of Western Civ is the separation from complexity.
JOHN CAGE: PARADOX REGAINED?
It is perfectly accurate and even interesting to characterize John Cage as an American Zen master (and all his work as a complex Koan) as long as it is entirely clear that he was not a formally trained Zen Buddhist, that he was as global in spirit as he was American, and that he thought of himself as master of nothing.
Cage tried to operate outside the kinds of polarities the West has produced in self-conscious ricochets between ideals of critique and transcendence. He wanted to avoid, in fact, all polarities, dichotomies, dualities, either/ors—all choices of two or less. His range was instead structured much more like the one we are accustomed to in everyday life, where countless, untold, untenable intersections and juxtapositions of events—some by design, most by chance—leave us stunned, amazed, dazed, astonished, curious, desperate, exhilarated, bewildered … crying and laughing, determined and helpless … amused/frightened/enraged/inspired … and, not in addition but in multiplication, any combination of the above. All this creates anything but a linear progression. It is world as vast, interconnected, infinite visual and sonic topological network, where paradigms of intricate multidimensional, interdisciplinary and intercultural complexities replace the vertical soundings of shallowness and depth that have characterized our Eurocentric critiques of judgment—“depth” increasing proportionally to distance from dailiness. Cage’s aesthetic paradigm brings us to fractal models which can represent infinite surface in finite space, replacing clearly defined inside/outside, us/them idealizations of Euclidean geometries with the detailed interpermeable dynamics of coastlines and crystals and weather.43 What I want to say is that new socioaesthetic paradigms must emerge if we are to live well in our increasingly complex intercultural world, and that Cage’s work enacts and suggests the invention of new models.44
JOHN CAGE: EXSTATIC
All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns. —GREGORY BATESON45
A sound accomplishes nothing; without it life would not last out the instant.
—JOHN CAGE46
The dry winter wind
Brings along with it
The sound of somewhere.
(Shinsei, Blyth, p. 530)
At the Mayflower Hotel in 1968, in the course of the lost interview, Buckminster Fuller said, “The simplest definition of a structure is just this: it is an inside and an outside.”
It is only a radical and powerful art that can take us to the outside of our structures.
PARADOX NOW
Since I cant be just a listener to silence Tm a composer.
How can I write sound that is silent?
I’m in a position when I write music of not knowing what Tm doing. I know how to do that.
—JOHN CAGE, remarks at Stanford University, 199247
John Cage was one of the best (un)known artists of our time. The caricatures of fame function as a substitute for knowledge. Very little in twentieth-century Western culture prepares us for Cage’s work. This is perhaps not a question of receptivity or the lack thereof, but of readiness. Readiness as a threshold marker has a long history in disciplines of attention and spiritual training in the East. It has to do with the way in which the person approaching the spiritual or cultural challenge has been prepared accidentally and intentionally—through experience, study, and even training—to take not the next step, but the next leap.
I am interested in forms that we cant discuss, but only experience.
—JOHN CAGE, Stanford, 1992
JOHN CAGE: SILENCE
